Kim A. Wagner @KimAtiWagner Twitter profile | Pikagi

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Kim A. Wagner

@KimAtiWagner

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Professor of Global and Imperial History, QMUL|

London

https://t.co/gYj1dXG4p0

Joined May 2016

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

13 days

I wrote a book about how people can watch an atrocity unfold before their very eyes yet still insist they see nothing. Or they see a massacre and call it a 'battle'. It's about a massacre that took place in 1906 - and I never imagined it would be so tragically relevant in 2024.

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

2 years

The definition of Orientalism captured in a single tweet...

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

3 years

Devastated to hear that Jallianwala Bagh, site of the Amritsar Massacre of 1919, has been revamped - which means that the last traces of the event have effectively been erased. This is what I wrote of the memorial in my book, describing a space that has now itself become history.

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

4 years

Hi @TPointUK - I'd like to report myself: today I gave a lecture on caste and violence in colonial India - it wasn't neutral; then I gave a lecture on the Amritsar Massacre - it wasn't neutral; then I did a seminar on looting and the British Empire - it wasn't neutral.

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

2 years

'If you want to read a book on Britain today by someone who truly knows every tube station in London and has interviewed many Beefeaters, I highly recommend...'

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

2 years

How it started How it's going

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

2 years

But if we want to understand how so-called liberal empires can perpetrate atrocities in the name of progress and still retain the conceit that they are a force for good in the world, then we cannot afford to look away...

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

4 years

If only there was a group of trained 'experts' who somehow 'preserved' past experience and could provide a meaningful framework for historically recurring phenomena, maybe in written form and with a sort of 'referencing' system so that people could themselves check the evidence🤦🏼‍♂️

@asymmetricinfo

Megan McArdle

@asymmetricinfo

4 years

No one alive remembers the last epidemic of this scale. Almost no one has even read about it. And many of the institutions that are now critical barely existed in 1918. We just have no frame of reference at all.

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

2 years

Let's not forget that racialised double-standards (i.e. the rule of colonial difference) was baked into the Hague Convention of 1899, which explicitly did not apply to so-called 'uncivilised' people...

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

4 years

The definition of Orientalism captured in a single image...

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

5 years

I read Jacob Rees-Mogg's new book 'The Victorians' so that you don't have to. It is so much worse than you ever imagined - it is of course not a history-book as much as a load of mytho-nostalgic drivel delivered with a straight face and an extra thick layer of jingoism...

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

3 years

Dear Britain: to state basic and irrefutable facts about the role of slavery, exploitation and racialised violence in the history of the Empire is not 'woke' or 'anti-British'. It *is* your history - and the past does not care about your sense of nationalist exceptionalism...

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

3 years

This is a really interesting read about the potential trauma of writing the history of atrocities etc:

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Can Historians Be Traumatized by History?

Their secondhand experience of past horrors can debilitate them.

newrepublic.com

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

5 years

There is something deeply obscene about the likes of Rees-Mogg and Naomi Wolf getting published and widely disseminated as 'historians' while so much brilliant scholarship by young historians, who have spent years actually researching their subjects, remains largely ignored...

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

3 years

Saul Dubow's response to Tombs' twaddle on the South African War in the Telegraph - good to see an actual expert weighing in 👇🏼👇🏼👇🏼

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

3 years

@PreetKGillMP This is the original entrance - the one taken by Dyer. Before and after:

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

2 years

The most remarkable thing about the Bud Dajo Massacre is that it was not some dirty secret - it was widely covered in the U.S. press at the time and both Mark Twain and W.E.B. Dubois wrote about it. Outside of the Philippines, however, it has been almost entirely forgotten.

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

2 years

Why focus on just one image? Because this is the carefully composed scene that the photographer decided to capture to celebrate an American victory. This is the image that the U.S. soldiers chose to pose for, literally standing on a pile of corpses.

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

3 years

Not too much to celebrate, but the contract for the film-option for 'Amritsar 1919' has now been signed. It's still a long-shot, but here's to hoping...

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

3 years

Happy birthday to William Morris, who knew exactly what the British Empire was about - here he imagines what the 1886 Indian and Colonial Exhibition would look like if it was honest:

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

5 years

The other day I got a Facebook reminder that it's been 10 years since I got my first academic job - and today my promotion to Professor of Global and Imperial History was confirmed. Thanks to all my friends, colleagues and students who helped make this possible 🙏

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

1 year

A brilliant demonstration of how nostalgia can be sustained only through amnesia - the footage is from 1926, just a few years after the British Empire reached its apogee, covering a quarter of the world...

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

2 years

Britain lost its empire long ago but never underwent a process of decolonisation - people were simply left to nourish their imperial phantom pains. The hysteric outburst of performative nostalgia in connection with the Queen's death is a direct symptom of this cultural aphasia...

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

4 years

I've said it before: If you wouldn't do a programme on the morality of Nazi Germany, you shouldn't be doing it on the British Empire. It is analytically so incredibly inept and could only have been conceived by someone profoundly ignorant about history...

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BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, The Morality of the British Empire

Engaging live debate examining the moral issues behind one of the week's news stories.

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

2 years

I have blurred the image here, but it is a restored version of an original print I discovered in a U.S. archive. There was in fact no less than three photographers present at Bud Dajo, though this is the most iconic image - taken with an old-fashioned 4x5 glass plate camera.

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

1 year

Dear academics: no-one cares about your niche topic. If you can't frame it it in terms of wider debates of broader relevance, you're just writing for yourself and your five nerdy friends... (PS: this applies to myself as well)

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

5 years

How unreasonable of me to harp on about racialised violence in a book about the Amritsar Massacre - from the review in the Telegraph.

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

4 years

We often hear this question in debates about the Empire: 'Is there a single positive thing to be said, in your view, about the British Empire?' The answer is no - I'm a historian, not a food-critic or a film-reviewer. And no-one would ask the same question about Nazi Germany.

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

3 years

If the 'British brand' has been tarnished simply by pointing out what it was that the British did, then maybe that brand was only ever just a myth? If a factually accurate assessment of the Empire has a 'knock-on-effect on our sense of patriotism', then maybe that's a good thing?

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

6 years

Dear Britain: everyone is a product of their time - yet some become abolitionists, while others become slave-traders. Some helped expanding the Empire, while others exposed the violence of imperialism. Maybe, just maybe, we need to think a bit harder, and a bit more critically...

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

10 months

My new book finally has a cover: 'Massacre in the Clouds - An American Atrocity and the Erasure of History' will be published by PublicAffairs in May 2024.

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

4 years

FYI: its perfectly legitimate to scrutinize the bookshelf of the guy who tried to revise the history curriculum...

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

4 years

My initial reaction to @SimonClarkeMP 's inane take on British history was despondency, but my students convinced me it's worth engaging - so here is a thread, since this really is a beautiful illustration of the right's historical illiteracy: 1/

@SimonClarkeMP

Simon Clarke

4 years

Our history is complex, as is inevitably the case for any nation state of at least 1,200 years. Re-writing parts of that history, or seeking to erase them because they are painful, or trying to impose today’s morality on people from a different era, does not bring enlightenment.

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

2 years

You can find the image in different versions all over the internet, but the story behind it remains obscure. I've spent several years tracking down the different copies, including commercial postcards, and I was finally able to identify the photographer earlier this year.

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

3 years

The Amritsar Massacre took place #OTD in 1919 - one of the worst atrocities in the history of the British Empire, though by no means an exceptional or isolated event. I've written a bit about it...

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

3 years

I think historical illiteracy plays a central yet underappreciated role in the recent rise of rightwing nationalism on both sides of the Atlantic...

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

6 years

Same book, different covers/titles - the Yale University Press and Penguin India editions of my new book on the Amritsar Massacre 1919, which will be out end of January 2019... #Amritsar1919 #JallianwalaBagh

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

4 years

When Shakespeare self-isolated from the plague in 1606, he marked 620 essays, finished four journal reviews and finally got around to revise and resubmit his third monograph, before updating his REF-submission and getting to the bottom of his inbox. What are you doing?

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

3 years

Since I'll be on sabbatical next year and have to write a book, I bought a new desk! This is where deep thoughts will be thunk...

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

3 years

I don't know who needs to hear this, but history is inseparable from historiography. The stories people tell themselves and others about the past are as important as what 'objectively' happened, and the notion of history without historiography is just a disingenuous conceit...

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

4 years

People were fine with the racism, corruption and incompetence, but disrespecting the war-dead is a step too far...🤨

@JeffreyGoldberg

Jeffrey Goldberg

@JeffreyGoldberg

4 years

New, from @TheAtlantic : Trump skipped a visit to an American military cemetery in France after calling the dead "losers" for getting killed: Full story here:

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

4 years

Funny you should mention that - the other week I gave a lecture on 'The (Mis)Rule of Law in British India', but please do enlighten me - what should I be teaching on the rule of law in a colonial context? PS: I don't teach the balance-sheet approach - no serious historians do.

@TPointUK

Turning Point UK 🇬🇧

4 years

We take it that as well as lecturing about these atrocities committed by the Empire you’re also providing a balanced picture by teaching some of the good that the Empire did so students can make their own mind up - e.g. abolish slavery, introduce rule of law etc...getting it yet?

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

2 years

So this seems to have taken off. If you're curious about how Orientalism has historically been weaponized, long before the 'War on Terror', I am currently writing a book about the killing of more than 1000 Muslim men, women and children by U.S. forces at Bud Dajo in 1906.

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

2 months

Your daily reminder that it is a key feature of colonial warfare to blame one's own violence on the alleged 'savagery' of the enemy - which essentially boils down to 'they made us do it'.

@SaulStaniforth

Saul Staniforth

@SaulStaniforth

2 months

Israeli politician Fleur Hassan-Nahoum is asked about the bodies of Palestinians being recovered from mass graves and she says they were terrorists. Kay Burley then asks why some of the victims had their hands tied behind their back.

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Kim A. Wagner

4 years

Never in the field of human conflict has so many WWII analogies been made by so many based on so little historical knowledge.

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

5 years

I'll stop obsessing over the violence of the Empire when others stop obsessing over the greatness of the Empire.

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

3 years

If anyone is wondering what stage the 'culture war' in the UK is currently at, we've reached the point of casual genocide denial and deliberate misrepresentation of Lemkin's work in @thetimes ...

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

4 years

I'm 45 today...no sure how I feel about that. How it started How it's going

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

3 years

Your daily reminder that to describe Cecil Rhodes as a white supremacist is not a 'woke' slur, or a matter of opinion, but a simple statement of fact. No-one can in good faith suggest otherwise. This is what Rhodes himself said, and what his imperialism looked like:

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

4 years

Britons never, never, never will be capable of having an informed debate about the f #cking Empire...

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

3 years

To those Americans who might be puzzled by all the talk in the UK about the report on racism just published by the Government: slavery is refered to as the 'Caribbean experience' - that's pretty much all you need to know...😑

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

5 years

Just wait till you hear about the British Empire, my friend...

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

3 years

After today's important announcement regarding new rules for flying the Union Jack, I can finally reveal the playbook behind the Government's plan to revive national pride in Britain. Been sitting on this for a while, so really excited to share - a LONG thread! /1

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

5 years

They took out the part where I describe the book as having 'all the authority and historical gravitas of an American Renaissance fair', but here is at any rate my review of 'The Victorians': Rees-Mogg’s book is ‘sentimental jingoism and empire nostalgia’

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Rees-Mogg’s book is ‘sentimental jingoism and empire nostalgia’

Tory MP’s tribute to the Victorians is more fantasy than history

www.theguardian.com

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

3 years

When Sikhs prepared langar and organised neighbourhood watches, after the authorities had relinquished responsibility in Amritsar a century ago, the British saw it as a usurpation of authority and evidence of rebellion. The result was the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre...

@PaulEmbery

Paul Embery

3 years

You don't break down barriers by pulling down statues or coercing people to take a knee or lecturing white people about their 'privilege'. You do it through meaningful and heartfelt acts of solidarity like this. Bravo, the Sikh community.

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

4 years

Didn't take long for this narrative to become firmly established - if you don't celebrate the Empire you're 'anti-British'. Wonder if critical scholarship of the Holocaust can also be considered 'anti-German'? Or exposing the atrocities of colonial Congo is now 'anti-Belgian'?

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

3 years

If anyone is genuinely interested in the Amritsar Massacre, I can warmly recommend @KashiHouse 's book, which includes numerous photographs of Jallianwala Bagh as it looked in 1919. The cover image shows the entrance and the view as you entered the Bagh. That no longer exists...

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

5 years

I was never under any illusion that I would be able to change people’s minds on the Amritsar Massacre, but naively assumed that by setting the historical record straight, even at the most basic level, I might at the very least inform the public debate. I was wrong. A thread. 1/

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

5 years

'Amritsar 1919' is out in paperback and in hindsight I realize it was a bit silly to spend so much time agonizing about choosing the right cover...

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

4 months

My book is coming out in three months and I am grateful and humbled by the early reviews from a number of amazing scholars whose work has been a huge source of inspiration for me. You can pre-order it here:

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

3 years

This is getting really tiresome...can't the rightwingers and conservatives muster a single professional historian of the British Empire, instead of 'history buffs' who simply repeat the same tired clichés that we've been listening to for the last century?

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

4 years

The statue of Cecil Rhodes should not be removed because he was a racist, but because it stands today as a monument to the refusal of Britain to face it's imperialist past. #RhodesMustFall

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

3 years

Reading Arendt on colonial violence is like...wtf?!

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

5 years

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

2 months

105 years ago, on 13 April 1919, the Amritsar Massacre took place in northern India, when British colonial troops opened fire on a large crowd of unarmed civilians - one of the defining moments in the history of the British Empire. And yes, I realise that I am a one-trick pony.

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

6 years

The cover for my new book (which according to Amazon will be out 14 Feb 2019) #AmritsarMassacre #Amritsar1919

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

3 years

'.. African cultures were, compared to European ones, obviously underdeveloped in the 1920s.' I still can't believe he wrote this - in an article explicitly addressing racism and the Empire...😐

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

3 years

Your daily reminder that the Tasmanian Genocide (1820s-30s) and the Herero and Nama Genocide (1904-8) are 'controversial' in the same way that the Holocaust is 'controversial' - they're *not*. No-one who has actually done any real research can in good faith argue otherwise...

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

3 years

I commend Nigel Biggar for finally coming out and being open and honest about his defense and celebration of white supremacist and arch-imperialist, Cecil Rhodes. The fact that this is based on a blatantly disingenuous misreading of the historical facts is another matter...

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

4 years

Yes, as a historian I am indeed obsessed by something that happened centuries ago...😆

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

4 years

Dear American colleagues working on race, gender and violence - this is the kind of stuff we're dealing with in the UK. In 2019. 😐 #twitterstorians

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

2 years

Nostalgia for empire nostalgia...😏

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

5 years

Classic Orientalism - 'they' are innately irrational and warlike, while we are rational and peaceful. And when we invade 'their' countries, 'their' resistance has nothing to do with our occupation but is simply a product of this innate proclivity to violence...

@joshtpm

Josh Marshall

5 years

Trump on war in Turkey/Syria: "They've been warring for many years. It's unnatural for us. But it's sorta natural for them. They fight. And they fight long and they fight hard."

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

5 years

My letter in @LRB on the Amritsar Massacre and how important it is not to simply dismiss it as a single moment of excess - the way that Jeremy Hunt and Teresa May did just yesterday (citing Churchill of course)... #Amritsar1919 #JallianwalaBagh #Massacre1919

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

3 years

My piece in Financial Times - why historic apologies should not be mistaken for a genuine reckoning with the past...

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

2 months

'Massacre in the Clouds' will be published in exactly one month. I know I post about it all the time - and promise to stop as soon as the Bud Dajo Massacre is recognized like Wounded Knee and My Lai as a key moment along the blood meridian that runs through American history...

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

3 years

This is just a reminder, if any was needed, that violence was *not* incidental but rather central to the British Empire and the imperial project more broadly. Since @NigelBiggar has yet again written a deeply flawed piece of Empire apologia, it's time for another thread - /1

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

2 years

@pmorganbentley - I just received this FOI request from you and @thetimes . You might just have asked instead of trawling for non-existent culture-war fodder. The answer, btw, is none...

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

2 years

I missed Rob Tombs' take on the Amritsar Massacre - quite amazing how he manages to get every single fact wrong about this...

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

3 years

Historical insight that genuinely reflects the complexities and nuances of the past has nothing to do with 'balance'. You can't combine the testimony of a Holocaust-survivor with that of a Holocast-denier to produce a more 'balanced and measured' understanding of Nazi atrocities.

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

2 years

Thanks to @tweeter_anita and @DalrympleWill for having me on their phenomenal @EmpirePodUK and letting me talk about one of my obsessions - the Jallianwala Bagh or Amritsar Massacre of 1919. If you're so minded, you can read my book on the subject - same book, different titles:

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

4 years

How differently we as historians treat perpetrators in colonial campaigns compared to those of 20th century genocides - not least because the latter are criminalized while the former were awarded medals and get to write their own history.

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

1 year

I just submitted the first draft of my manuscript on the Bud Dajo Massacre 1906 to the editor - by far the most difficult book I've worked on, not least because it's written almost entirely from primary sources. Thanks to everyone who helped me - full acknowledgement to follow...

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

26 days

"WHEN PEOPLE THINK OF THEMSELVES AS THE 'GOOD GUYS' REGARDLESS OF THE VIOLENCE THEY INFLICT, THERE IS ULTIMATELY NO ATROCITY THEY ARE NOT WILLING TO JUSTIFY" From my book 'Massacre in the Clouds - An American Atrocity and the Erasure of History' out now with PublicAffairs:

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

2 years

It was during the fighting against the Muslim Moros in the southern Philippines that American troops first used pig's blood as a form of spiritual warfare. Donald Trump later worked a garbled version of this true story into his speeches during the election in 2016 and after...

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

3 years

Two men walk into a bar. The bartender is possibly transgender. The first man is frozen in fear that he might use a pronoun that might offend. The second man is not obsessed about other people's genitals and just asks for a beer like any normal person would.

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@KimAtiWagner

Kim A. Wagner

1 year

I do wonder which part of the violence and exploitation of the British Empire Sandbrook believes is 'imagined'...🤔

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Kim A. Wagner

3 years

One of the foremost (and quite basic) duties of historians working on imperialism and settler-violence pertains to the language we use: -'massacre', not 'battle' -'routine targeting of unarmed civilians', not 'isolated incident' -'deliberate policy', not 'tragedy' -etc. etc.

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Kim A. Wagner

4 years

Have had to quickly modify some of my uni lectures for home-schooling a 5 and 7 year-old from tomorrow. Curriculum for day one of Uncle Kim's School For Kids Who Don't Read Good: 'Colonial Violence and the Performance of Power in 19th Century India. With crayons and snack-bars.'

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Kim A. Wagner

14 days

Your daily reminder that the concept of 'human shields' has been used to justify atrocities for well over a century - this is how the commander of the American forces in the southern Philippines justified the slaughter of 1000 men, women and children at Bud Dajo in 1906:

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Kim A. Wagner

4 years

Pulling down our own statues 'erases history' but stealing other people's statues 'preserves history'?!?

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Kim A. Wagner

3 years

Nice to see this in print!

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Kim A. Wagner

5 years

I read Jeremy Black's new book so that you don't have to...

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Kim A. Wagner

2 months

Just received the first copies of 'Massacre in the Clouds' - by far the hardest book I've worked on. It uncovers the story of the Bud Dajo Massacre through a single photograph and as such the book itself can be considered a 100.000-word caption.

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Kim A. Wagner

2 years

While the world slowly burns, the rightwingers cheerily pursue their self-concocted culture war - FOI request received by colleague at London university:

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Kim A. Wagner

3 years

I'm pretty sure I explicitly argued that the past cannot be reduced to a matter of 'good' or 'bad'...😏

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Kim A. Wagner

6 years

The post-Brexit plan for economic growth consists of luring passing containerships close enough to the coastline so that they get stranded, after which we can slaughter the crews and salvage the goods. Maybe a future anthropologist will write about the Brexit cargo-cult...

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Kim A. Wagner

4 years

'The salient fact about the British Empire was not its existence [...] buts its largely peaceful & voluntary dismantling' Sometimes I wonder whether people really are this historically illiterate or whether they're just being disingenuous. Which is it @danny__kruger ?

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Kim A. Wagner

4 years

How it started How it ended

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